Remember back in May when I bought myself a new set of kitchen knives? Well, since then I’ve learnt a bit about sharpening and honing knives, which I previously didn’t know. Sharpening is when you grind metal off the knife blade to produce a sharp edge. But honing is a completely different thing.
When a knife is used, the sharp edge tends to bend and fold over sideways, due to pressure on things you’re cutting and on the cutting board. This doesn’t make the edge blunt exactly, but it does make it harder to cut, because the sharp edge is no longer pointing straight down as you cut with downwards force. Honing is the process of straightening the bent edge, so making it easier to cut again. Proper knife care is to hone the edge frequently—every week, or even every time you use the knife—but only sharpen it a few times a year. To hone a knife, you need a honing steel. (And I note that Wikipedia article says that “honing” is a misnomer, borrowed from some other industrial process that does remove material from an edge – yeesh, this terminology is even more pedantic than I thought two minutes ago.)
Hmmm… Further reading of the Wikipedia article tells me that perhaps I’ve wasted my money, as modern kitchen knives tend to be harder and not respond to honing steels, but rather need an abrasive “steel” that actually does grind the edge down a little. Grrr.
I wish the Internet would make up its mind and not provide conflicting/outdated/overly-pedantic-but-incorrect advice.
Anyway, in other news I booked myself a golf lesson today, for Friday morning. I’ve never had a lesson up to now, but I feel like I’m really not making any progress with hitting a driver, and need some help. So we’ll see if a golf pro can straighten out my technique in half an hour enough that I can go practise on my own and see some improvement.
In other other news, for some reason Irregular Webcomic! failed to update automatically again today, after also failing last Tuesday. I have it set up as a cron job and I know when it should run, and it failed two Tuesdays in a row. But it worked every other day of the week—at the expected time (so no daylight saving issue)—and all my other comics updated at the same time as normal. So cron seems to have done its thing correctly. I can’t imagine why cron would fail to run one specific job only on a Tuesday. And in fact I ran the script manually as soon as I realised the automatic cron job had failed, and it ran fine. So the script itself shouldn’t have failed.
Unfortunately I don’t have a way to distinguish the cases [cron failed to run the script] and [cron ran the script but the script failed]. I might have to add some logging calls to the script to see if it runs properly on Tuesday next week. This is very mysterious.
New content today:
Maybe your server has been down or is rebooting it self on Tuesdays at the time your cron script is supposed to run? If so, the problem could be that cron itself is not there to run the script.
No, it runs multiple scripts at the same time, one to update each different comic, and all of the other ones ran as expected.